Remix64 Editorial - December 2003

How are you feeling? How are you REALLY feeling? There's been a bit of discussion on the boards recently about depression: the real stuff, not the I'm a bit sad stuff. It's not really surprising to find that the population of people creating music is a fair bit weirder than the listening audience.

All music essentially comes from a feeling of dissatisfaction. It must do, because by creating something, you're changing the world. Maybe only in a small way, but you are. So for you to start doing something, you must have thought the world needs this, or the world would be a better place with this, or reality sucks, I need to let my mind loose. And, looking at musicians, you can see this all too obviously: the best music comes from people with severely unbalanced personalities: and I don't mean unbalanced in a nasty way: I mean that their priorities and way of looking at the world are ever so slightly alien to the masses. Sometimes this manifests as star quality, or charisma. Why is Robbie Williams a star, and Gary Barlow isn't? Easy, Robbie has personality quirks a-plenty, and a basis of self-loathing. Gary was an easy-going guy who'd rather be behind his JV2080: and it showed.

Sometimes you can see an artist's creative impetus go down as their happiness goes up. Phil Collins, for example. When he was a screwed up divorcee, he produced bitter masterpieces such as Face Value and No Jacket Required. He gets happy, settles down, gets a studio in his shed? We start getting Testify and Into the light. Same with Sting. Angry young man? Classic Police. Smug happy git? Well,everything in the last ten years 😉

And let's face it: it takes someone without a sense of perspective to have the confidence to put their work out in front of the world and say I'm special, I am.

So, here's to music. And if life seems unbearably bleak, go and do a remix. It will probably come out better than if you were happy!

Chris